Poor diet costs health service 6bn a year

The effects of poor diet costs the NHS 6bn a year – more than three times as much as smoking, according to latest research.

The study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health took European data from World Health Organization and calculated the proportion of ill health and deaths attributable to food.

The research team, led by Dr Mike Rayner of the British Heart Foundation Health Promotion Research Group in the Department of Public Health at Oxford University, then used a composite term – disability adjusted life years (DALYs) – to describe the impact of ill health and death.

Rayner calculated that 37% of DALYs were attributable to food-related diseases, with just a fraction of this (0.2%) attributable to food poisoning. The 6bn bill was double that of road traffic accidents, and significantly higher than the cost of obesity, he added.